Injury data reported by the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) indicates that there is no continuous parental monitoring or adult supervision and control of children while they are in the vicinity of household appliances. As a result, many children have been injured from mishandling appliances, such as dishwashers. A trend in operation control for appliance applications has therefore been to provide mechanisms to safeguard against injuries suffered by children mishandling appliances.
A trend in operation control for low-power microprocessor applications has been to use a processor feature called “sleep mode.” In this mode, the processor consumes an extremely small amount of power and has drastically reduced functionality. When called upon, it can be taken out of sleep mode either by a timer, or by a signal to a certain pin of the processor. After the processor is taken out of sleep mode, it is capable of performing a particular function and then returning to the sleep mode. For example, cell phones may be configured to “wake up” for only a few microseconds once every second to check and see if there is an incoming call. However, such a sleep mode configuration still consumes power/energy. As such, in some instances, it may be desirable for the processor to use no power when not needed. Particularly, such a zero standby power processor/controller may be advantageous when applied in the context of appliances.